Quotes About Oppression

There are not grades of racism. There's racism.

I am entirely against censorship. It goes against my basic grain - a mature society need not be told what to do.

My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.

Those in the developing world have so few rights - we take a lot for granted in the developed world.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

On Thanksgiving Night, 1942, when I was fifteen years old, white racists burned our house to the ground.

We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.

Where liberty dies, evil grows.

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

When I speak out against the guns or against the big corporations, some of my friends say, 'Oh Yoko, be careful. These people have all the power.' But, you know, most people don't speak out because they are frightened.

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

How come it's all right for the bad guys to do whatever they want, and whenever I want to do something it's 'forget about it'?

the poor don't have much in the way of money or possessions to steal—so it turns out that the most profitable thing to steal is the whole person.

There are more slaves in the world today (best estimate—27 million) than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. And there are more slaves in India today than in any other country in the world.

For the hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people who live outside the protection of the rule of law, they principal reason they suffer abuse is often not the absence of good laws, but the absence of a functioning public justice system to enforce those laws.

Without the world noticing, the locusts of common, criminal violence are right now ravaging the lives and dreams of billions of our poorest neighbors.

You are probably not regularly being threatened with being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed. But if you were among the world's poorest billions, you would be.

If you have total government it makes little difference whether you call it Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Caesarism or Pharaohism. It's all pretty much the same from the standpoint of the people who must live and suffer under it.

Homosexuals are... widely consigned to the same category of things as drugs, the category of illicit dirty things that people have to be protected from... since the homosexual is continually taught by the world around him that his natural home is the sewer, the homosexual is uniquely equipped to discover what truly belongs and doesn't belong in the sewer.

Because rich people were excused from the suffering of the world, they had to invent their own more elaborate and personalized forms of suffering and then to inflict baroque versions of that stunted inferiority onto others.

Maybe there really only was one singular white man staring down at the world from his official boots and his official vehicle and his official sunglasses hanging high over his official smirk.

Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." I

Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.

One of the goals of classical education is to discern the appropriate manner by which the mistreated and oppressed can challenge their oppressors without destroying their civilization.